That would be in places like Jamestown, New York where a community meeting was held recently floating the idea of the city, about 70 miles from Buffalo, becoming a new hub for refugee placement.
The article at The Post-Journal does not mention Afghans (they are not real refugees anyway), but surely some would be in the mix if the city welcomes a resettlement contractor*** to town.
Remember that Biden is still shooting to admit 125,000 refugees other than Afghan evacuees this fiscal year.
As we have pointed out previously, housing almost everywhere is in short supply and so Small City, USA will be targeted.
Editor: In my previous postI might have left the impression that I had a list of where the Afghans will be going after they are evicted from military bases before February 15th. I don’t know that there is a list, but you need only enter your city or state into a search engine along with the word refugees, or Afghans and you can find the answer yourself if plans are in the works (usually in relative secrecy) for your community.
I’m posting this not because I need to warn Jamestown residents, they should already know about the meeting held last week, but because there are some nuggets in here that I need to warn all of you about.
‘Embracing Diversity’: City Eyed As Potential Location For Refugee Resettlement
The potential benefits of Jamestown becoming a resettlement location for refugees were discussed Thursday evening during a well-attended gathering at St Luke’s Episcopal Church.
The get together included representatives from a host of local and regional nonprofits and organizations and has been several months in the making. The discussion Thursday centered on refugees — people who have fled war, violence or conflict and are seeking safety in another country — and whether Jamestown has the resources available to welcome them.
Democrat Mayor Sundquist virtue-signals about “embracing diversity!”
“When we started to see an increase of refugees across the states, we heard a lot of comments, got a lot of emails, a lot of phone calls about ways our community could help and support those refugees,” Mayor Eddie Sundquist told a crowd of about 50 at St. Lukes. “It’s not often that we would see refugees here in the city, but as you all know we are a city built on immigration, built on a melting pot of different people, different ideas. That’s what made us strong many, many years ago and could make us even stronger as we continue.”
City officials have been in contact with Journey’s End, a refugee resettlement agency in Buffalo. Sundquist said on average, Journey’s End takes in about 500 refugees a year; this year they are also expecting an additional 500 refugees.
An issue arising in the Buffalo area for resettlement, Sundquist said following talks with Journey’s End, is the increase in housing costs. Resettlement agencies receive a set amount of money per refugee to assist them with housing, groceries and travel.
“Since they couldn’t even find housing, many of the refugees are actually being put up in hotels in the Buffalo area until they are able to find suitable housing,” the mayor said.
[….]
The mayor’s administration has been working with resettlement agencies, including Journey’s End, to look into establishing a pilot program in Jamestown. If it’s found the city has the right resources in place — appropriate housing, workforce development, health care and educational partners — as many as 20 refugees could be brought over initially.
Sounds reasonable, right? Here is the problem, pay attention! There is no such thing as a pilot program! Once your community has begun bringing in refugees, you can’t stop the flow!
The contractors will not honor any limit you set! Believe me there are many cities in America where mayors have tried and failed to stop the flow once they realized that their city was in overload.
Indeed once the immigrant seed community arrives, it is the contractor’s job to bring the extended family members, and, if you say no more, then you (the mean citizens) will be called racist and unwelcoming!
Sundquist said the pilot program could help set the framework for the community “embracing diversity.”
[….]
Also raised was the topic of safety for the refugees, with some stating that not everyone in the community may be as open to the idea of refugees settling in the city. Chautauqua County Sheriff James Quattrone, also in attendance, said safety is a legitimate concern that would need to be taken into account.
That is the other major red flag in this story. You see how it is set up, if you voice an objection for legitimate reasons (housing, cost of health care and education etc.), then they have already pegged you as someone who might actually physically hurt a refugee!
Sundquist said his administration would take all the notes and input received Thursday and continue working with state and local partners on establishing a pilot program. Another community meeting could be set in the next couple of weeks.
If you live in Jamestown or anywhere nearby (refugees can be resettled within a hundred mile radius of the primary resettlement office), and have a problem with this you better get to the next meeting!
As I have said till I’m blue in the face, organizing locally is all you have!
And, if you aren’t in Jamestown, you need to search the web for media reports (or even reports directly on contractors’ websites) for plans for your community as the political Leftists are working as fast as they can (as Biden’s popularity plummets) to change America by changing the people.
I love the chance to post my favorite Church World Service pic!
*** For new readers, these are the nine major resettlement contractors. Whenever you read about some local resettlement agency, it is helpful to figure out which of the nine the local contractor subcontracts for.
In this case Journey’s End is a subcontractor of Church World Service.
“I haven’t felt the commitment and the attention I was expecting.” [From the Biden Administration]
Angie Plummer, Ohio resettlement contractor
Hope all of you had a good Thanksgiving with your friends and family. No promises, but I will try to post from time to time so I won’t have too big a gap in my now nearly 15 year running catalog of ills surrounding the US Refugee Admissions Program.
Reminder: there are over 9,000 posts archived here at RRW and the search function works pretty well. Choose a few key words and see what is here.
You surely know by now that the tens of thousands of Afghan evacuees are being treated like legitimate refugees and have swamped the refugee program causing complaints to surface from other ethnic groups and from contractors*** who do not want the Afghans to completely wipe out the chances of others, like the Somali starring in thisColumbus Dispatchreport, getting their extended family members into the US.
Biden’s pause on refugee resettlement worries agencies, advocates in Greater Columbus
Aden Hassan wants his mother here. He blamed Trump for not moving faster and now he blames Biden.
Biden has paused the regular resettlement program in order to accommodate the Afghans, many of whom have not been vetted and likely will never be legal refugees.
Columbus is a top Somali resettlement target city
Angie Plummer, executive director of local refugee resettlement agency Community Refugee and Immigration Services (CRIS) [CRIS is a subcontractor of Church World Service—ed], which resettled Hassan, said there’s no reason why Afghans and refugees from other countries can’t be helped simultaneously.
“When we were asked do we want to pause (refugee) arrivals, I said no because it’s apples and oranges,” Plummer said. “We don’t think that it’s necessary. It’s not a competition for resources to have these folks come.”
[….]
“I fear there’s only so much bandwidth and that it’s shifted to focusing on Afghans, and we can’t take our eyes off these other crises that are happening,” Plummer said. “We want to serve the Afghans well, but we also feel committed to serving those people whose cases we started and who got the shaft under Trump.”
In light of the pause, refugee resettlement advocates are lamenting the fact that Biden did not prioritize rebuilding the refugee resettlement program as soon as he was inaugurated in January.
Plummer said she is concerned because the program’s capacity is still being rebuilt after Trump’s administration decimated its infrastructure.
“Any stopping and starting creates pains,” Plummer said. “I worry about that. Even if their intentions are to try to exempt out certain groups, we should be trying to ramp it back up and help this machinery work again.”
[….]
“I haven’t felt the commitment and the attention I was expecting,” Plummer said. “I really thought some wrongs would be righted and they haven’t been, and it feels like they’ve been shuffled down the road.”
Meredith Owen, Church World Service
The fact that the administration hasn’t prioritized restoring resettlement capacity sooner makes Meredith Owen, director of policy and advocacy at the national refugee resettlement agency Church World Service (CWS), furious.
“The problem is you never want to undermine or harm one refugee population in the name of another,” Owen said.
But, that is exactly what is happening. Muslim Afghans are apparently Biden’s priority. There is much more, visit theColumbus Dispatch for additional details.
*** For new readers, these are the nine major federal resettlement agencies which have contracts with the US State Department and the Department of Health and Human Services, Office of Refugee Resettlement to place refugees (find housing!) and get them signed up for their welfare benefits, their medical care and get the refugee kids in school.
If you have an agency working near you and it doesn’t have the same name as one of the nine below, check its website carefully and you will most likely find it is a subcontractor of one of the nine (like CRIS is a CWS subcontractor).
Poor mouthing….
Know that when they “got the shaft” under the Trump Administration they were fundraising on their plight something they can’t do now that their guy is in charge of the taxpayer portion of their money stream.
Darn! It is comments like that which will force me out of semi-retirement because no one in the media ever calls them on this crap!
Thanks to a reader for sending me this news from CNN that appeared in a few media outlets around the country, here at CBS 58 in Milwaukee.
But, before I give you the money quote, pay attention to this story. The refugee contractors have long wanted to see a private refugee sponsorship program set up as a way to increase the numbers of ‘refugees’ admitted to the US.
The private sponsors would be in addition to their paid work as government resettlement contractors.
The massive number of Biden’s Afghans cannot be accommodated under the present system so this trial run at finding private sponsors for thousands of families outside the present system could be just the ticket they have long hankered for.
HIAS CEO Mark Hetfield
Note too that Afghans could be placed anywhere, and that the long understood one hundred mile radius of an approved refugee resettlement site will no longer apply.
Anyway, here is what Mark Hetfield of HIAS, Inc (formerly the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society) says and continues to say about how the Trump administration decimated the contractor system.
It just is not true!
But after four years of historic low arrivals under the Trump administration, agencies had to close some of their offices around the country, limiting where refugees can be relocated — a significant hurdle at a time when housing options are already hard to come by.
“We just didn’t have the capacity after the beating we took under the Trump administration,” said Mark Hetfield, the president and CEO of HIAS, a refugee resettlement agency.
The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society did NOT take a beating under Trump as you can see from data at USA Spending!
In fact, Trump upped their income from early years of the Obama Administration.
First year under Obama:
First year under Trump:
Last full Trump year:
You could actually say that Trump nearly doubled the federal dole to HIAS from Obama’s early years.
But, now, they are in the money as Biden has gifted them just about $50 million of your tax dollars for their charitable (ha!) good works.
Apparently salaries did not suffer under Trump either!
Thanks to a reader for alerting me to more news about churches in Wyoming hankering for their very own Afghans (I won’t call them refugees as they are not!) even as the governor has so far said Wyoming won’t be part of Biden’s airlift.
Wyoming Churches Take In Afghan Refugees After The State Governor Refuses
CHURCHES in Wyoming hope to support Afghan refugees to live among them. The churches step in because their state is the only one in the United States that does not have a refugee resettlement program.
Wyoming Episcopal Bishop Rt Revd Paul-Gordon Chandler said he was greatly encouraged by the churches’ desire to “welcome the stranger.”
In a letter to the congregations last week, he said: “Some of the churches in our diocese are currently examining the possibility of accepting an Afghan refugee family or, in one way or another, supporting the resettlement of Afghan refugees in our country. For example, the sacristy of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Casper last month voted unanimously to begin investigating the process of sponsoring an Afghan family.
“Since Wyoming does not have a government-funded refugee resettlement program, it requires some creative thinking and close collaboration with the episcopal migration ministries whose mission is this sacred work.”
He said that while the office was not “lobbying” the governor’s office on the matter, it was having “encouraging talks”. [I sure hope those of you concerned about changing Wyoming are having “talks” with the governor too!—ed]
[….]
The Rector of St. Mark’s in Casper, Wyoming, Revd Dr. Jim Shumard told ENS: “Most Afghan families want to go where there is an Afghan community. There is no community here. We pray that other local churches will support other families so that we can build a fellowship together. “
He is right, most refugees will simply up and move to be with their own kind of people.
Local church volunteers will burn out trying to supply all the needs of the newcomers who won’t have jobs for a long time, who won’t be able to drive themselves to anything, and who will expect certain culturally appropriate foods and so forth. Eventually the ‘new Americans’ up and move to ethnic enclaves of their own kind with nary a farewell glance. I have seen it many times!
However, what their presence will bring is a resettlement contractor office such as the one mentioned in this article—Episcopal Migration Ministries—one of nine federal contractors (below for new readers)!
It bugs the heck out of them that Wyoming has resisted their “sacred work” for over 4 decades.
It drives the open borders refugee contractors crazy because they have never gotten a foothold in Wyoming!
They have been trying for years to open Wyoming’s borders to the world, but the state has resisted for forty years as the only state in the nation that never set up a refugee program and never invited a refugee contractor*** in to do their dirty work.
The most recent effort to shove diversity down the throats of Wyoming’s mostly rural population came in 2014—an effort that was thwarted by vocal hardworking citizen activists. (I met some of those citizens on my 2016 road trip through the West and Midwest.)
I wrote extensively about efforts to bring a refugee office to the state in a series of posts. The topic of refugee resettlement became a major issue in a gubernatorial race on-going at that time.
Serious students of the refugee program should have a look at my Wyoming archive by clicking here.
By the way, they did break Montanaa few years ago and Idaho is being radically changed through refugee resettlement.
Thanks to reader Edward for sending a link and tipping me offto John Binder’s report on the latest push.
WaPo: Diversify ‘Overwhelmingly White and Christian’ Wyoming with Afghans
The Washington Post is promoting a proposal to diversify the “overwhelmingly white and Christian” state of Wyoming by resettling Afghans in the region.
As part of President Joe Biden’s massive resettlement operation out of Afghanistan, his administration plans to resettle at least 95,000 Afghans across 46 states. The only states or territories not taking Afghans are Hawaii, South Dakota, West Virginia, Wyoming, and Washington, DC.
Wyoming is the only state in the nation where the federal government does not annually resettle refugees. That is mostly because none of the nine taxpayer-funded refugee contractors have offices in the state.
Believe it or not, when the Refugee Act of 1980 (Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter) became law, states could choose whether to become a resettlement state.
Wyoming (wisely) managed to stay out of the resettlement system all these years and that rankles those who are working to change America by changing the people.
In a piece titled “One state has never taken in refugees. Will it welcome Afghans?,” the Post explores a proposal by a local Episcopal church in Casper, Wyoming, to take in Afghans.
The Post interviewed a series of individuals for the piece, including those who said Afghan resettlement in Wyoming could “help with diversification” and break from their “conservative beliefs.”
For new readers here are the nine major refugee contractors financed by the US taxpayer who are now busy placing Afghans (who are not refugees!) in cities and towns from sea to shining sea.
They operate with the assistance of at least 100 subcontractors all linked back to one of the nine motherships.
The nine along with the US State Department determine target resettlement sites.
Believe it or not, when the Refugee Act of 1980 (Ted Kennedy, Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter) became law, states could choose whether to become a resettlement state.